A fired former senior Trump administration official lambasted those who have attacked him and his agency in the wake of President Trump’s loss.
“How un-American and undemocratic it is that the actual individuals that are responsible for the process of this most sacred democratic institution of elections are the ones that are getting — getting the blowback here,” Chris Krebs said in a live interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Wednesday.
Joe diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who is serving on Trump’s election legal team, said in an interview Monday night that the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director ought to be “taken out and shot.”
“We’re actively undermining democracy. We’re actively undermining confidence in the electoral process,” Krebs said Wednesday. “How the heck are we going to recruit election workers and election administration officials going forward if they think they’re going to get death threats online and in person? This has got to stop. It has to stop. We have to let the professionals do their jobs, and it’s — it’s well beyond time for everyone on both sides of the political spectrum to call for an end.”
DiGenova attempted to walk back his comment Tuesday, saying he meant the comment in jest. Krebs maintained Wednesday that legal action from his team of lawyers was imminent and that he would respond to diGenova in closed-door meetings, not in public.
“I’m not going to litigate this in, you know, on TV and in — in a, you know, in a parking lot somewhere. My lawyers will do the talking. They’ll do it in court,” said Krebs. “They’re an outstanding team that knows how to win, and like I said yesterday, they’re gonna be busy.”
Trump announced Krebs’s termination last month following CISA’s statements that foreign powers had not interfered in the election and that the results were sound. In the four weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign has sued several states for alleged irregularities that the president has described as a Democratic effort to “steal” the election. The campaign and the White House have not proven these claims.
In the days following the election, CISA launched a “Rumor Control” page that denounced “disinformation” that included White House messaging. Krebs has been outspoken on Twitter, retweeting an election organization director’s message urging the public not to share “baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.”
Krebs, a former top official at Microsoft, joined the Trump administration as senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security in March 2017. He then was nominated and later confirmed as undersecretary for national protection and programs at the Department of Homeland Security. That office was replaced by the CISA, and Krebs was made its director of operations, assisting 8,000 election systems nationwide to secure the 2020 vote.
